Get Reel | Bryan Nagao mixes cuisines at Town to brilliant effect

I've been following Bryan Nagao's career since he was chef at Felix at The Peninsula. I didn't care for his pan-Asian cuisine at Felix, but liked his food at subsequent places, all of which have come and gone: modern Japanese at Kokage, French at Chez Moi, and Japanese-Italian fusion at D Diamond.

At Town, I don't know what to call his cuisine — it has Italian, French and Japanese influences. Whatever it is, it works.

I started with a dish from the pasta section: spaghettini with uni, pata negra and lardo (HK$228), which is the best pasta dish I've tasted in recent memory.

Uni loses much of its flavour when cooked, and Nagao solves that problem by piling it on the pasta at the last minute, so it's barely warmed. It's a generous portion of uni, so you get some in every bite. The hot pasta also warms the fine slices of lardo that are draped over the ingredients, and the light sauce is punctuated with salty bites of the pata negra. It's a fantastic dish.

My guest loved his French onion soup (HK$98), which had a thin but deeply flavoured broth topped with a crusty crouton and plenty of melted, stretchy comté cheese.